Nisha Samuel

The brief

One of our first web projects as Maroon Balloon, we’re still very proud of this one. Via a recommendation, London-based Nisha Samuel commissioned us to create a website to showcase her impressive portfolio of video FX and motion graphics work, the prestigious client list including Saatchi, ITV, Bloomberg, Unilever and Barnado’s.

We were also asked to create a logo that clearly represented her range of VFX and design services. Being predominantly video based, the website had to include a large number of embedded videos in gallery format, which became our first challenge…

The solution

We tasked a trusted professional designer with the creation of a strong brand with an engaging logo based on the client’s preferred vibrant colour scheme. This formed the basis of the website design, which the designer provided as InDesign mock ups, and from which we built bespoke PHP web page templates in a heavily customized WordPress environment.

Embedding video feeds from Vimeo into a gallery format took some doing, since stacking video elements in the same way as we would with static photos simply doesn’t work ‘out of the box’. After much serious head-scratching we worked some magic with JavaScript, PHP and CSS to present the videos in a photo gallery format (where clicking on a thumbnail loads a new video into the same, auto-pausing previous videos).

Added to this was some colour-coding of pages, sections and Vimeo controls to aid navigation and provide consistency and the end product was born. Definitely a case of the swan gliding gracefully on the water but frantically paddling below!

The result

It’s fair to say that Nisha was thrilled with the final result. We must admit we were pretty chuffed too. The website development phase was admittedly challenging in places (but don’t we all learn by pushing ourselves?), but we think the hard work paid off with the site looking fantastically slick and operating smoothly. The logo, colour scheme and subsequent email signature design convey modernity appropriate to the industry in which Nisha operates.

A heavily customized administrative backend makes adding new videos to the site a breeze. Getting slightly more technical, it utilizes custom post types and categories to define what content appears in each section of the website. This means that each content type is clear and easy to upload for a non-technical person. This attention to detail during the development phase became apparent to the client during the admin training session, where she was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to maintain her site content.

Customer feedback

“Maroon Balloon are amazing! They listened attentively to my requirements and came up with a brilliant website that presented my motion graphics and visual effects work. One thing that stood out when compared to other web designers is that they took time to explain how the site works and the steps I needed to follow to update it. The backend of the WordPress site is customised so that when I want to add new video content, they have left useful how-to notes which are easy to follow. And any additional development and follow up work has also been addressed quickly and effectively.”